The start of December marks the beginning of Advent in the (Western) Church calendar; indeed, this, not the January 1st, is the traditional start of the Christian calendar. I will be doing a bit of end-of-calendar-year reflection at the end of the month as usual, but I am also taking this as a moment to mark a moment in the year with a few notes and updates.
First, as every year, I am off of social media for all of Advent. While I have been enjoying Bluesky, and while there is always a reason to stay “engaged” — this year, trying still to find my next role, and to keep building an audience for my music — those reasons seem to me, more and more, to be the very reasons to step away like this on the regular.
By way of being off social media, I aim to try to build up more of a habit around posting to my Notes section here — inspired fairly directly by the way Tom MacWright posts to his Micro section. My differentiation between Essays, Journal, and Notes is a bit fuzzy, and will likely always remain so, but you can get a feel for the distinction as it feels to me by looking at the kind of things I have been posting to Notes in the past few days and comparing it to what I publish in Journal. Think of it as roughly order of magnitude differences in polish: a Journal entry gets 10× the editing and revision that a Note does, and an essay 10× again.
Second, I just went public, over on my music newsletter, with a project I started all the way back in late spring 2021 and have been working on quietly ever since: composing my first symphony. I am somewhere about three quarters of the way through drafting it, and then will need to spend considerable time on revisions. I plan to keep up my daily
Third, I am a few weeks late on getting back to some folks with a title and abstract for a conference I am giving a keynote at in the fall; getting that done will be one of my main priorities early this week!
Fourth, I am hoping to close the deal on my next job this month. I have had some near misses in both directions over the course of the year, and I am grateful that we have been well-provided-for courtesy of the work I have had on my plate updating and writing new materials for The Rust Programming Language. On which note: those new materials are out in the world now, and will be part of stable Rust in Rust 1.85 along with the Rust 2024 Edition!
Fifth, I plan to finish migrating jaimiekrycho.com from WordPress to Ghost1 and to get at least one of my sites (most likely chriskrycho.music) building with my own custom site builder. The fact that the latter is at last in reach is a delight. I started on the work which is finally finding its way to fruition all the way back in 2016, and have just slowly chipped away at it on a roughly-annual basis until the past few months, when I finally started making real progress.
Sixth, lots of reading: I aim to finish two volumes of poetry, both from friends or acquaintances, as well as the fiction and nonfiction I actually have in flight, and perhaps also to start in on Tad Williams The Last King of Osten Ard now that it is nearing publication of its final volume.
Finally, of course: lots of family time and several “extra” church services compared to the baseline — Advent is not Ordinary Time! This is good!
So there you have it: an Advent update. As I have been saying in many an email correspondence lately: More anon!
Notes
I was unhappy with the price-to-value ratio, and Jaimie did not love the editor, and then the WordPress drama blew up. An easy decision to switch to the much-nicer and less expensive and lower-drama Ghost. ↩︎